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Landauer Games has announced that beta sign ups for Star Sonata 2 are now being accepted. The closed beta phase of development is slated to begin on September 10th. According to developers, Star Sonata 2 is set to transform the 'retro' look of Star Sonata 1 and change the look to a modern, polished MMORPG.

FEATURES

Action-based combat and movement

8 classes, 4 trade skills, and 127 total skills that the players can train as they progress.

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Watched a few of the videos, controls and movement looks alot like an isometric Continuum.. If anyone is familiar with that game... Cool idea, although I bet a lot of people will be turned off by the graphics, might be worth taking a closer look...

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You can control the tilt of the camera and put it in top-down mode if you'd like. While it is *slightly* easier to control yourself in pure top-down mode, it looks a lot better at an angle and you can see a little bit more, so I personally prefer keeping the camera tilted. It plays just like the old arcade game Asteroids, or Star Control 2 and games like that.

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I'm not sure that I agree with that.

One of the major features of Star Sonata is that there is a huge universe, much of which is randomly generated, and players may colonize and build bases almost wherever they want. It is up to the players to decide where to build, how to defend it, and where to set their robotic trade slave ships to run trade routes. All of this is entirely non-linear, unscripted, and open to players and their entrepreneurial instincts.

In the current Star Sonata main server, there are 9161 different galaxies, a significant percent of which is open to building, which yeilds emergent politics, wars, and economic realities. If you look up "sandbox game" in Wikipedia, you get this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_world), and I think it's a little bit narrow to say that because players may have an artificial restriction in one facet, that the game is not open in style.

Yes, Star Sonata does have classes, but the 36 "class" related skills are a minority of the 127 total skills to be found in the game, and an even smaller minority of the skills that any individual player will train, since the class skills are distict in that they are mutually exclusive from each other. There are still nearly infinite combinations of different class skills with the other skills.

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Your character and all your ships carry over between universes. Players "pack up" their bases and redeploy them in the new universe which is re-randomized every 3-4 months. The universe reset is one of the most exciting aspects of the game -- it's like an Oklahoma land rush -- and keeps things from getting stale.